Why I'm Posting about Ukraine

Let me say that I became interested in Ukraine because two of my grandparents were born there (my grandfather was born in Odessa which was then Russian) and because I have a number of internet friends there and had been aware of the corruption and poverty most people face. I went there in 2010 to visit some friends (as I mentioned elsewhere, I visited a friend in Poland on the same trip). I spent a week on vacation in a Crimean beach resort (Alushta), a few days in Dnepropetrovsk, and one day in Kiev. I took the train to and from Crimea and met Ukrainians on the return trip. I don't pretend that that makes me an expert on Ukraine, though I bought two large histories of Ukraine and read one during my trip. I've read other books on Ukraine as well, both historical and literary. I'm currently reading a novel by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who was born in Kiev but moved to Moscow, which is very similar to the story of Mikhail Bulgakov, who is probably the most popular 20th century novelist in the Russian language. Bulgakov's best known work is "The Master and Margarita" but I've read many of his books in translaton, including his biography of Moliere. I've read three contemporary Ukrainian novels by Andrey Kurkov, which portray the situation in Ukraine through satire. By chance when I looked him up to get the names of his novels right, I found that he had written an article for The Telegraph today. The three books of his that I've read will give you a feel for the Ukraine which motivated these protests, especially Death of a Penguin. There was a sequel entitled Penguin Lost. The third book I read, The President's Last Love, is about a fictional Ukrainian president.

I've also been studying Polish history and literature for several years (one of my grandfathers came from there) and also Slovakian history (my other grandmother was born there). When the protests began in Kiev, one of my friends there joined them and we started discussing what was going on. We have continued to do so. She and my friend in Poland have sent me many links commenting on the protests. One of the most interesting was from a Russian journalist and photographer who flew to Kiev to see for himself what was going on. His site has both English and Russian with wonderful photos. I have corroborating information from other sources, too. I don't think anyone has really questioned that this has been a popular uprising with participation from people of many political positions, both languages, and all ages and walks of life. That's why I insist on that as a starting point of analysis. Though I'm not an expert as I said above, I probably know more than most Americans do about Ukraine.

Russian Propaganda on Ukraine

There are two elements to the virulent propaganda coming out in Russian organs such as RT (Russian Television in English) and from Russian government officials such as Putin himself and his UN representative. These are first that Russian speakers in Ukraine (who are the majority) are under threat and second that the removal of former President Yanukovich is a coup. Both these claims are complete nonsense. There is zero evidence of threats to Russian-speaking Ukrainians. I know for a fact that there were Russian-speaking Ukrainians participating in the uprising in Kiev. Dnepropetrovsk, which is a city in which Russian is the first language for most residents, had a demonstration of 10,000 people against the Russian invasion on Sunday, March 2 (a friend posted a video on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, of that demonstration in which the Ukrainian national anthem was sung). Dnepropetrovsk is an industrial city of 2 million people founded by Catherine the Great. Its name was changed from Ekaterinasburg to Dnepropetrovsk during the Soviet period. Certainly, Russian-speaking Crimeans were never under any threat. Again, they are the largest group in the population there and I have seen no reports, even from Russia, of threats to them. So, that is plainly a blatant lie spread by Russia to justify its invasion.

Second, the uprising in Ukraine is no more a coup than was the American revolution. One of the principles of our Declaration of Independence is that an aggrieved people has the right to remove an unjust government. People have an absolute right to exist, but the right of a state to exist is conditional on its behavior. If a state had the absolute right to exist, we would still be living under English rule. Yanukovich was removed when he ordered his snipers to shoot down about 80 protesters from the tops of buildings in Kiev. That horrified Ukrainians, and Yanukovich fled to Russia. Talk of a coup is completely unjustified.

Some left commentators in the US, such as Professor Stephen Cohen, have cited Russian military fears as a Russian motivation, but that is also very far-fetched. Ukraine is a fairly large country and has a large army, but it is dwarfed by the size and military strength of Russia. Ukraine had nuclear weapons when it became independent, but it gave them up (to Russia) under an agreement which guaranteed its security. The idea that Ukraine would or could militarily attack or threaten Russia is preposterous. Putin obviously knows that.

The situation in Ukraine is very fluid, and nobody knows how it will turn out. The Russian invasion is an attempt to shape it in ways that the Russian government, but not the Ukrainian people, would prefer. No matter how loudly Putin shouts and how angry he looks, his actions have no reasonable justification. Putin also alleges that the uprising in Kiev was instigated by Europe and the United States. There is also no evidence of that. Europe and the United States would like to shape the direction of Ukraine just as Russia would like to do so, but they did not and could not instigate a Ukrainian uprising as the US has, for example, in Venezuela. Ukrainians have very strong and very just grievances against their government. They rose up because of those grievances. No outside instigation was required to cause that. Putin makes no mention of those grievances because many of his Russian citizens have similar grievances against him.

Since he has no rational justification for his invasion, it is completely understandable that Putin would order his state organs to disseminate vicious and false propaganda about why he has invaded Ukraine. It is more difficult to understand why some on the American left spread the same sort of false propaganda.

My View of Ukraine

I wrote what is below in response to an article I read on the Columbia1968 discussion group. I don't have permission to post that article so it isn't here. Conn Hallinan's article attempts to explain why Russia is so concerned about Ukraine, among other things. I hear similar arguments from Stephen Cohen on the radio. My main point below is that you don't evaluate events in Ukraine by first outlining the actions and interests of outside powers. You should first try to understand what is happening in Ukraine and then discuss the international factors. Incidentally, I hear Russian leaders asserting that the US government instigated protests in Ukraine, and that is plainly nonsense propaganda.

Conn Hallinan is an old friend of mine (I knew him as Ringo, each of the members of his large family had a nickname), but he is ignoring the first principle of analysis here. There are certainly international machinations from Europe, the US, and Russia over the future of Ukraine. There are certainly fascists in Ukraine and their participation in the uprising was very noticeable (though there are more fascists, for example, in France). But that is not where you start in understanding what is happening. Where you start is in Ukraine. There is and was no doubt that this is a genuine popular uprising involving people from all language groups, classes of the population (aside from the oligarchs), and a very wide range of political views. If you have been to Ukraine in recent times (I went there for 2 weeks in 2010) or talk to ordinary Ukrainians (I do that almost every day recently), the reason for the uprising is blatantly obvious. Their lives have beenunbearable. The police routinely take bribes to allow activities which are legal in most places. Employers stop paying employees (one of my friends had a good job at a bank; they stopped paying her and she quit after 3 months) with no recourse. Her parents are both physicians and live a very modest lifestyle (they invited me to their house for dinner), though, to be fair, physicians have historically not been well-paid there. It's quite difficult to get a visa to travel to the rest of Europe. We now know that something like $70 billion was stolen by government leaders and the oligarchs they work for and stashed abroad. I'm sure every Ukrainian could make a much longer list. The two major parties, that of Yanukovich and that of Timoshenko, both fostered this corruption. That's why Timoshenko is fiercely hated. She came to power in the Orange Revolution, which was also against corruption, and she made things even worse. I'm sure she belonged in jail,perhaps in a cell next to Yanukovich. The current prime minister, Yatsenyuk, (he happens to be Jewish, by the way, and is also partly Romanian) is from her coalition. I'm sure that many Ukrainians look at Europe and the United States and think they see the kind of society they want; the kind of total political corruption we and the Europeans have in which financial and corporate capital controls the political debate and the government is well-hidden from most Ukrainians, as it is, for example, from many Americans. So, this is the starting point. The Ukrainian people were unable to go on in the old way.

Second, Ukraine' s economy is very distorted, not only by corruption, but because of the method of economic organization in the Soviet Union, in which there was a division of labor among the Soviet republics with each part contributing toward the whole economy. After the Soviet Union broke up, what was needed was massive investment to shift industrial production, transportation infrastructure, etc. to create an independent economy with Ukraine' s valuable resources. That did not happen. Instead, Ukraine' s resources were used to enrich a relatively small number of powerful individuals at the expense of everyone else per the corruption above. Ukraine isn't the only place with these problems, but unlike neighboring Belarus, for example, Ukraine has had some political space in which to operate and protests have not been ruthlessly repressed until the day before Yanukovich fell. That is why this happened in Ukraine rather than somewhere else. The Ukrainian
government was unable to continue in the old way.

That is the starting point. The Ukrainian people rose up in a genuine revolutionary uprising which they maintained for months. Clearly, rightwing fascists enthusiastically participated in the uprising and are very visible and militant, but the vast majority of participants were not from this group. Most Ukrainians consider Russian to be their native language, though many are bilingual in Ukrainian. Note that historically, when Ukraine was under foreign control, the most recent such control being from Russia, the foreign rulers tried to suppress the Ukrainian language, and language and literature became strong avenues of resistance. Ironically, both Ukrainian and Russian became modern languages of literature in the 19th century in the hands of Taras Shevchenko and Alexander Pushkin (whose great-grandfather was an enslaved African who became an aristocrat). Tsarist Russia also tried to bring Ukrainians under the Russian Orthodox Church. That is one reason
why Ukraine has insisted on Ukrainian as being the primary language. For example, when you land in the airport in Kiev, the sign in Ukrainian says Kyiv. However, Russian has never been suppressed, despite the silly resolution passed by the new parliament last week.

So, we have a genuine uprising. The participation of fascists is troubling, but they were not powerful enough to be dangerous and unlike Egypt, for example, no foreign powers will be sending them support. Ukraine' s disastrous economy and the uprising presented Europe and the US with what they saw as an opportunity to draw Ukraine into their sphere. Of course, they want to do it with the IMF and its absurd austerity demands, which the Ukrainian people will also see as absurd. At the same time, Russia sees all this as very threatening, not militarily, not from fascists, but precisely because Ukrainians are rising up against essentially the same type of system of control that exists in Russia and Belarus. I've only seen one report of Russian citizens demonstrating support for the Ukrainian uprising, though there are more reports and even small demonstrations against the Russian invasion in Russia now, but we know that there is strong Russian opposition to
Putin which is likely very sympathetic with the Ukrainian uprising. On the other side, if you read RT (English-language Russian television from the Russian government), it has been filled with vicious and false propaganda against the Ukrainian uprising. I'm sure internal propaganda in Russian is just as vicious and false.

So, where should progressives stand? Plainly, we have to side with a genuine uprising as we did in Egypt despite the participation of Islamic extremists in that uprising. The Russian invasion is plainly directed squarely at that uprising. Note that the new Ukrainian government is not a very good reflection of the uprising. The people who rose up generally do not trust the parliamentary leaders, whether it is Yatsenyuk, Klitchko, or others. They see them either as completely intertwined with government corruption or as opportunists who would like to become part of a corrupt government. They lack a party which reflects their aspirations and thus they lack genuine leaders. In these circumstances, just as in Egypt, it is unlikely that the protesters will get what they want in the short-term, although they are very aware of that and suspicious since the 2004 revolution produced no significant change. Unless the Russian invasion stops it, Ukraine is supposed
to have elections in May. I don't know whether there will be candidates who genuinely represent the uprising and its aspirations. That is up to Ukrainians to manage.

Personally, I think our role should be to expose what Russia, the US, and Europe are doing to control Ukraine from the outside and to derail the uprising. Ukrainians have shown that they want to deal with the situation inside their country, and they should be allowed to do so. They may not succeed, but it is their right to try.